Words chain together likedead lights strung in the trees.I think of empty bowlsin my room. I think ofstories I forgot to tell you,the ones I can’t remember.I wait for the end of a journeythat cannot end,

aisles always rushingtoward another gate. B21 A15 B26.They flip the entrance open,adhered to this time like treesrooted, inescapable time. Soldiersin lost woods. Taut rope. My bodylike a blurred line in the billowingfourth dimension. Disappear

in every way, disappearinto the center of the elm and birch.In the pith of my head, fingersof ghosts grasp at the fuselage,sinking us to the grey world below.The ending is always less than you expect.Door shut. Shore melt. Earth reappearing.Simulacra converging

in the sound of a giant flute,that world hazing away like a lanterncarried into a blizzard, the lightpaling, like a laughing corpse,into the darknessyou put inside me.

When You Are Ready To Drown

And suddenly, the music is quiet.The sacrifice of known moral grounds is necessary for thedevelopment of great nations someone says.I put my hand into a small well. Your bodycan be a small well. I can fall into yourbody and wake up drowningin the words you keep in there.I swam for many years. I was never a star athlete.But swimming in a well is differentthan swimming in a pool someone says.Someone has never been inside you.Dead batteries in my mouth. Liverounds in my jogging pants. I amrunning from something very large.I shoot a very large gun but the gun only shoots blanks.I am running from an empty coat filledwith the outline of a person.No stone unturned. I shot out thebowels of a sleep I couldn’t shakeand I have been swimming in a black poolin the darkness in the darkness in thedarkness ever since. So it goes,two red violins playing underwater.How hard can you listen? How hard can youget when you put your hand in your pantsfinding only your empty hand?Bloated corpse on the shore. How can you be surethat you meant to eat that last meal?How can you be sure that you wanted a choice?How can you know when the personon the other end of the line is sure?I turn my hand over and I see fiftydifferent ways to feel for you. A hundredto look for your ghost. One to go to sleep.One to make the sun set. One to turn youon and off until the bulb burns out.

Butterfly Killer

Across the ocean,the sand is in its billion pellets.Stare into the glowing television.There is nothing to do.Lift your handto point an objectat another object,and press a buttonthat allows escapefrom the body. People run,

on the screenthey move across the beigetoward black shadows.They look like small miceescaping some black hand.The shadows stretch acrossthe ground like a large animalis standing somewhere

off camera.The smoke moves alongthe ground. It is an uneasycloud that has come to visit.Outside, the light has come on.You walk to the windowin the pantry, scan the yardfor something living,the light flooding intoa dark, frozen world.

Choose to ignorethis, turn awayyour wandering gaze.Say wordsabout a place you havenever been. Saythat this is the apocalypsebecause truly, you have no scaleon which to judge.

In the living room, watchblurry images shiftacross sparkling pixels,and know these are humans.Look into the eyesof a man who says wordsyou don’t understand.Glare of a bladethe only contrast againstthe velvet-black figure

Another man kneelson a banner of scriptso foreign.The bag around his headmeans he could be anyone;means he could be you or me.

When they pull the bag offthere’s nothing there.The man on screendrops his blade andlooks into the baglike a surprised magician,and, like a magic trickit is empty.

Enjoy,from the comfort of your home,sink into the fleshy cushions,change channels of lightinto what you desire, like molding,or like the press of a buttonthe world changing coursewith fractal neurons firing--this is your greatest power.

Here’s mine:I look into the camera.

I smile at youas you watch me on the screen.I hold the bag in the airlike a net without the holes.The black smoke plumesinto me, air waveringin a heated aura.

The real trick is tocatch the smoke while it’s younglike baby birds, or butterflies freshfrom their primordial ooze.

If I can just captureenough of this darkness I can capture this metamorphosis.

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Max Sheppard is a BFA Painting graduate from the University of Nebraska at Omaha, and can't help himself but to muddle the arts by making poetry as well. He enjoys small town cafés, surrealism, and 3-hour Japanese dramas.